Free Republic

The state uses gun-related hashtags the most in the U.S., according to a study by the insurance company NetQuote. The company combed through more than 6 million Instagram posts from 2013 to 2015 to find about half a million posts on the photo-sharing app with gun-related hashtags and location information. Nevada posts more than 200 gun-related hashtags for every 100,000 residents, according to the study. Hawaii, Florida, Arizona and Oregon trail Nevada to make up the top five states using the most gun hashtags such as #2a, #firearms, #girlswithguns, #gunporn and #pewpew. The study also lists Paradise, a designation for...

Last week, Black Lives Matter St. Paul threatened a "shutdown action" at Como Park over the teacher's social media posts critical of school district support of teachers. Theo Olson, the Como Park High teacher whose social-media posts over behavior-related issues were assailed recently by Black Lives Matter St. Paul, is on paid administrative leave, the St. Paul School District said Wednesday. The leave began on Wednesday, but the reasons for it were not disclosed. "I cannot share the reason why, as that is private personnel data," said Toya Stewart Downey, a district spokeswoman. Last week, Black Lives Matter St. Paul...

Every now and then I’m reminded of just how clever Satan can be, especially during Lent.Consider, for example, a pernicious little sin that seems to have taken root and grown in the age of social media: detraction. I’ve been seeing it more and more. Nobody really talks about it or the harm it inflicts — though the pope has stressed, often, the inherent evil of its close cousin,  gossip. (The pontiff has even compared gossip to terrorism.)So what’s the big deal? Let me count the ways.First, the catechism teaches that detraction is a sin against the eighth commandment: 2477 Respect for the reputation of persons forbids every attitude and...

It generated controversy and criticism when word of it first broke back in October, even though Peeple, a people-rating mobile app that was likened to being the "Yelp for people," hadn't launched yet. Now, after a number of tweaks to the concept, the people-rating app finally launched today. Peeple is available to download for free for iPhones or iPads. The app, which was created by two friends in Calgary, Canada, allows users to rate other users in three categories: personal, professional, and romantic. The idea is to provide "a reference check for the people around us," the creators say on...

Deploying Lena didn't work. Neither did shout-outs from Beyoncé, Kim, Ilana and Abbi, Ariana, Katy, Demi or either of the Amys. (snip) Why are so many young'uns feeling the Bern? I see two main reasons. The first is that, to millennials, Sanders's socialism is a feature, not a bug. Much of the current conversation about Sanders's "democratic socialism" is predicated on whether Americans can look past this supposedly toxic label. But millennials love Sanders not despite his socialism, but because of it. "Socialism" has never been a dirty word for the current cohort of youth, who either didn't live through...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Investors gave LinkedIn a poor job review Friday in the form of a dramatic sell-off that wiped out nearly $11 billion in the professional networking site's market value. A surprise forecast for slower growth this year sent LinkedIn shares into a stomach-turning plunge of almost 44 percent. After the market closed Thursday, the online company reported better-than-expected earnings for the last quarter but warned that revenue would fall short of what analysts had projected for 2016. It also said it was discontinuing a new online advertising system that hadn't worked out.

ON New Year’s Eve, in the shadow of Cologne’s cathedral, crowds of North African and Middle Eastern men accosted women out for the night’s festivities. They surrounded them, groped them, robbed them. Two women were reportedly raped. Though there were similar incidents from Hamburg to Helsinki, the authorities at first played down the assaults, lest they prove inconvenient for Angela Merkel’s policy of mass asylum for refugees. That delay has now cost Cologne’s police chief his job. But the German government still seems more concerned about policing restless natives — most recently through a deal with Facebook and Google to...

A woman whose pickup truck was stolen has had the vehicle returned after an awful pencil drawing she posted online went viral . Zaira Salazar Medina didn't have a photo of her car so instead sketched the 1991 Nissan from memory and posted it on Facebook in a bid to track it down. The amateur drawing caused a stir on social media and sparked a flurry of memes with people editing the image into scenarios of the car in various places.

There may be no more American thing to do than to bemoan the declining state of everyone younger than you. Even Ben Franklin believed the youths of the 1700s fell short of the generations that had gone before. "The best capacities require cultivation, it being truly with them," Franklin said, "as with the best ground, which unless well tilled and sowed with profitable seed, produces only ranker weeds." A prime catalyst for those fears frequently has been new and evolving technology. In the early 20th century, even bicycles were seen as a tool of immorality, as romantic trysts between young...

Although I am not going to give formal engineering or quality management consulting advice in an opinion column, I do remember a seminar on ISO 9001:2015's new provision for "Actions to address risks and opportunities" that warned how social networking can demolish a business' reputation in days or even hours. I saw this in action when a department store, which I will not name because it was falsely accused in a news article (a credible source as opposed to "somebody's blog") of removing Israeli goods from its shelves. The store's Facebook page was instantly flooded with negative posts and negative...

If you use Facebook- and that's everyone who sees this post - then your relationship with Facebook will be redefined by the government if the ‪Omnibus‬ spending bill before the Senate is passed into law. Tomorrow we are scheduled to vote on a 2,000 page spending bill to fund the government through the end of next year. It was crafted in a back-room deal with almost no input from most members of Congress. Because of the "must-pass" nature of the bill, those in the room air-dropped controversial cybersecurity legislation into the bill, hoping no one would object. If this bill...

My original article, outlining how to defeat ISIS through an online assault, was met with a chorus of laughter. ( http://bit.ly/1Qsejtb ) I suggested that in order to defeat ISIS we must first shut them down online. In essence, this would starve them of their oxygen. Donald Trump has also suggested that we need to "shut down the Internet." That too has been met with a great deal of ridicule and laughter. But what does that mean? Just this week, we've learned that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has a rule that restricts its agents from reviewing social media...

Intentional omission of a search of social media activity in the name of political correctness The dictionary describes an idealogue as “one given to fanciful ideas or theories”. Unfortunately the Department of Homeland Security is replete with such people. They are dangerous to our health and well being because of their fantasies, in particular the notion that one’s social media activities are private and not subject to search. The most egregious and astonishing fact associated with the failure to prevent the recent tragic loss of fourteen lives in San Bernardino was the intentional omission of a search of social media...

What if Homeland Security has a 95% failure rate in screening jihadi brides? We reported dive crews were searching a lake in San Bernardino for evidence related to the terror attack that left 14 Americans dead.It appears that investigators may have located some: Divers recovered items from a lake in San Bernardino, Calif., where a couple who killed 14 at a nearby regional center Dec. 2 possibly dumped evidence on the day of their shooting spree, according to various media accounts,…Divers began searching the lake Thursday, and some items were recovered before the search concluded Saturday, but the FBI did not reveal...

UPDATE: It gets worse. ABC News is reporting that Homeland Security officials have been bound by a secret US policy not to scrutinize visa applicants' social media footprint because the Obama administration feared bad press over "civil liberties." This represents an stunning, intentional dereliction of duty -- all for PR: Fearing a civil liberties backlash and "bad public relations" for the Obama administration, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson refused in early 2014 to end a secret U.S. policy that prohibited immigration officials from reviewing the social media messages of all foreign citizens applying for U.S. visas, a former senior department official...

When I was a press secretary in the U.S. Senate, my boss instilled in me an important lesson: Don't put anything in an email you don't want to see on the front page of the Washington Post the next day. It was an obvious lesson once you thought about it, but it was one many people never seem to learn. I worked in the Senate in 2006, before Facebook and Twitter. But the lesson should be even more true for social media. I don't understand why some people don't get this, but it happened again last week. I broke a...

First Trump drew the harshest of criticism from the "establishment" over his comments on muslim immigration. Now as the waters start to recede a bit some things are emerging. Namely, it's starting to creep up on some that it's actually a fairly decent Idea. Everybody watched for the trap door to drop and listened for the snap of the noose. Nothing happened. Now emerging ... the war on social media and it's unfettered access to the plebeians. Social media is a problem for the "establishment". First immediate concern is ISIS and their successful social media propaganda campaign. How far behind...

Social media is big, and with old media embracing it we've seen local media in particular pump their social media follower count like it's the new ratings standard.... ....two days ago, when a tipster alerted me to WPLG's Twitter account @WPLGLocal10 and how fast they were gaining followers. They were literally adding 1,000+ followers per hour. Shortly after a few others emailed SFLTV about it, even viewers who found it humorous they're being followed and unfollowed by WPLG on Twitter. ....People we talked to alleged WPLG bought Twitter followers.... ...All told in the span of less than 3 days WPLG...

For some time I have been saying that Muslim immigration into the United States should be stopped until we can properly vet them or until the war with Islam is over. Donald J. Trump has been criticized by some for saying something similar. The new Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said yesterday that he disagrees-saying that "such views are not what this party stands for and more importantly it’s not what this country stands for." Politicians in Washington seem to be totally disconnected with reality. Research shows that there are 2.75 million Muslims living in the U.S. According to...

Digital Counterinsurgency How to Marginalize the Islamic State Online By Jared Cohen The Islamic State, or ISIS, is the first terrorist group to hold both physical and digital territory: in addition to the swaths of land it controls in Iraq and Syria, it dominates pockets of the Internet with relative impunity.... ... in late 2014, 46,000 Twitter accounts openly supported the group. Back then, strategies for fighting ISIS online centered on simply removing such accounts.... ... the gamut from popular public platforms to private chat rooms to encrypted messaging systems such as WhatsApp, Kik, Wickr, Zello, and Telegram... ... churn...