Free Republic

Comedian Terrence K. Williams of “The Deplorables” comedy troupe, pleaded for help Friday amidst fears Twitter was targeting his account for his support of President Trump. A popular blue check conservative with over 600,000 followers, Williams received a legal warning from Twitter right before he was to go to the White House’s “Young Black Leadership Summit.” A little after 2pm on October 4, Williams tweeted, “TWITTERS LEGAL TEAM CONTACTED ME ON THE DAY I GO TO THE WHITE HOUSE! People want to take my account down because I said Schiff Should Resign, called out AOC & I support Pres @realDonaldTrump...

The head of the FBI is speaking out against Facebook’s decision to add encryption to its Messenger program. While speaking to law enforcement officials in Washington Friday, FBI Director Christopher Wray said law enforcement agencies could lose the ability to find criminals online and bring them to justice. The new encryption would shield communication between users from surveillance and the content would also be inaccessible by the company, meaning agencies can’t get access even with a warrant. Director Wray continued by saying Facebook’s plan would create a lawless space for child predators without fear of consequences. “Facebook would transform from...

Labor appointee was rehired after hit job was discredited Bloomberg Law finally apologized and retracted a September article that falsely accused Department of Labor appointee Leif Olson of anti-Semitism. Editor-in-Chief Cesca Antonelli told staffers she made the decision after "we spent the last few weeks reviewing our coverage and our editorial processes." The story "did not meet our editorial standards for fairness and accuracy." She did not elaborate on why the review took so long given immediate pushback from reporters and fellow attorneys. "We regret that lapse and have retracted the story," Antonelli said on Friday. "We are also strengthening...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is worth an estimated $69 billion, stated in a recent internal Q&A that he sympathizes with Bernie Sanders’ view on billionaires, and agrees that “no one deserves to have that much money.” CNBC reports that during a livestreamed employee Q&A call this week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed a number of topics including politics. Zuckerberg was asked to respond to Senator Bernie Sanders’s comment that billionaires should not exist, and gave a surprising answer given that Zuckerberg himself is worth $69 billion. “I understand where he’s coming from,” Zuckerberg said. “I don’t know that I...

The EU's top court has ruled that national courts in Europe can order Facebook and other online platforms to remove defamatory content worldwide (AFP Photo/DENIS CHARLET) More Luxembourg (AFP) - Facebook on Wednesday was dealt a major blow in the EU's top court, which ruled that national courts in Europe can order online platforms to remove defamatory content worldwide. The decision will be seen as a victory for EU regulators, who are ambitious to see US tech giants meet tightened European standards over hate speech and offensive content. Last week, the same court decided that Google was not legally compelled...

A U.S. congressional committee has requested a trove of internal Facebook documents that the company’s critics say will demonstrate how the social media giant unfairly leveraged its market dominance to crush or absorb competitors. The request by the House Judiciary Committee comes amid a flurry of new antitrust investigations of technology giants, including ones by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general. At issue here is a cache of internal Facebook documents unearthed in a case brought by Six4Three, a defunct startup whose founders have waged a bitter four-year legal battle with the social network. In a nine-page Sept....

Ask Internet entrepreneur and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Reid Hoffman how he decides which companies to invest in, and he’ll tell you he has a simple litmus test to determine whether to give the idea a closer look. “I want to invest in companies that play to one or more of the seven deadly sins,” Hoffman said. For those a bit rusty, those sins would be: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. Hoffman, best known as co-founder of LinkedIn, says the business-professional networking-platform most embodies the deadly sin of greed. “In the end, LinkedIn is helping someone earn...

Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a filing to the Supreme Court on Wednesday that the company disagrees with President Trump’s decision to terminate DACA, the Obama-era program that shields some immigrants without documentation from being deported. ″We are distressed at the prospect of ripping our DACA colleagues from the fabric of our company,” Cook and HR head Deidre O’Brien wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief. Apple said it employs 443 dreamers, or people that DACA protects from deportation. The Trump administration’s effort to undo DACA is part of a broader effort to restrict immigration, whether it’s through family separation at...

Cracks are forming in the coalition Facebook Inc. assembled to build a global cryptocurrency-based payments network. Visa Inc., Mastercard Inc. and other financial partners that signed on to help build and maintain the Libra payments network are reconsidering their involvement following a backlash from U.S. and European government officials, according to people familiar with the matter. Wary of attracting regulatory scrutiny, executives of some of Libra’s backers have declined Facebook’s requests to publicly support the project, the people said. Their reluctance has Facebook scrambling to keep Libra on track. Policy executives from Libra’s more than two dozen backers—a group called...

President Donald Trump and his allies are outspending rivals on impeachment-related advertising on Facebook, demonstrating their dominance on the platform as they wrestle for control of a fast-evolving narrative that could threaten his presidency. The spending discrepancy appears to be as gaping as 4 to 1, based on recent data from Facebook's public ad archive, which reports all figures in ranges. Between Sept 20 and Tuesday morning (Oct 2), Trump allies funneled as much as US$3 million (S$4.1 million) into ads opposing impeachment or assailing House Democrats for beginning a formal inquiry, according to data analysed by Laura Edelson, a...

Mark Zuckerberg and Elizabeth Warren are clashing over her plan to break up the tech titans — a war of words that could test the limits of Silicon Valley’s liberal leanings. The Facebook CEO was caught railing against Warren and her proposal to smash the internet’s virtual monopolies — Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple — in leaked audio of open meetings with employees this summer released Tuesday by The Verge. “You have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies … if she gets elected president, then I would bet that we...

A recent report from the New York Times outlines how child pornography has exploded across the Internet, including the startling fact that two out of every three reports of child sexual abuse material involve Facebook Messenger. A recent report from the New York Times titled “The Internet Is Overrun With Images of Child Sexual Abuse. What Went Wrong?” outlines the growing problem of child pornography online and how it has continued to spread in the digital age. According to the report, 12 million of 18.4 million, or two out of every three reports of child pornography online, come from the Facebook Messenger app.The Big Tech Masters...

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is accusing Facebook of allowing President Trump to "mislead the American people" without facing any consequences. DNC CEO Seema Nanda made the allegations in a Tuesday interview with CNN just a week after the tech giant announced that it would not remove posts or advertisements from politicians if they happen to violate the company's community rules. Nanda told CNN that Facebook's move will allow Trump to "mislead the American people on their platform unimpeded." "We know that Trump has an utter disregard for the truth," she said. "Social media platforms have a responsibility to protect...

During an internal meeting at Facebook this summer, CEO Mark Zuckerberg vowed to “fight” any efforts to break up his company, according to audio leaked by The Verge. When an employee asked Zuckerberg about the rise of presidential candidates like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has proposed breaking up Big Tech, the tech executive said he was not afraid of a “legal challenge,” according to a transcript of the leaked audio. “I mean, if she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge,”...

President Donald Trump is using his powerful social media presence to push back against the impeachment inquiry, tweeting and retweeting more than 100 times over the weekend and his reelection campaign has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook ads on the topic over the past week. More than 1,800 ads on Trump's Facebook page mentioning "impeachment" have run in the past seven days. The ads have been viewed between 16 and 18 million times on Facebook and the campaign has spent between $600,000 and $2,000,000 on the effort, according to data analyzed by Laura Edelson, a researcher at...

The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) sent out a press release last Wednesday demanding that Twitter suspend its most important account: that of President Trump. Because Trump has repeatedly enraged Leftists by going over the heads of the establishment media and talking directly to the American people through his tweets, there are no doubt a large number of tweets that have made Leftists want him gone from Twitter forever. But the one that sent CAIR over the edge committed the sin that is absolutely, finally, unanswerably unpardonable: Trump had the audacity to criticize that sacred cow of all sacred...

The company has now officially started a test that will remove public visibility of Like, reaction and video view counts from people's posts and ads across Facebook. This is going to be happening only in Australia, though, and Facebook told Engadget it has not decided whether the test will expand to other places in the future. If you're a Facebook user in Australia, this means that while your friends and family will still be able to like and add emoji reactions to your posts, they won't be able to see how many others interacted with it. The same goes if...

I know many of you don't use facebook. I do to keep in touch with friends overseas. A message pop-up'd on my feed from Kamala asking if I wanted to take a survey and said sure.

The Servant of God, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, wrote in 1948: “[Satan] will set up a counter church which will be the ape of the [Catholic] Church … It will have all the notes and characteristics of the Church, but in reverse and EMPTIED OF ITS DIVINE CONTENT.” “We are living in the days of the Apocalypse, the last days of our era. The two great forces – the Mystical Body of Christ and the Mystical Body of the anti-Christ – are beginning to draw battle lines for the catastrophic contest.” “The False prophet will have A RELIGION WITHOUT A CROSS....

There are so many things wrong with this story - “He went underwater to propose to his girlfriend, but he didn't live to hear her say ‘yes’” - and all of them are related to social media. Before Facebook/Twitter/Instagram reduced all significant life events to the ubiquitous selfie and/or video clip it might have been sufficient to take your girlfriend to a $1700/night resort, where you booked a glass room submerged 30 feet below water, to propose. But then, I’m so old that I remember when that trip wouldn’t have happened until after the wedding so what do I know?But...