Free Republic

Facebook announced they are making a portal that will allow users to find out if they liked pages or followed Instagram accounts made by the Internet Research Agency, the Russian internet company that was outed as a troll farm after the 2016 election. The portal will provide a database of those potential pages and accounts that would have been liked or followed between January 2015 and August 2017, before and after the 2016 election. “This is part of our ongoing effort to protect our platforms and the people who use them from bad actors who try to undermine our democracy,”...

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is not shy when expressing his opinions of President Trump. The entrepreneur, who now sits on Microsoft's board of directors and is a partner at venture capital firm Greylock, campaigned publicly for Hillary Clinton and in March said that Trump was even worse than he feared. In an interview with CNBC's Julia Boorstin at the Disruptor 50 event in San Francisco on Wednesday night, Hoffman had perhaps his harshest words yet about the president, calling him "worse than useless" and saying that he'd "take someone randomly picked from a phone book" over him as president. He...

RUSH: You know, I got to thinking about it. I say so much, the amount of content disseminated every hour on this program, it’s even tough for me to remember it all. You know, I’ll say something on X day, and two weeks later, a story will happen, and I will remember I predicted it, and I wonder how many of you in the audience remember. I’ll never know. I’ll never know. I assume many of you do because I assume you listen very closely and very carefully, but at the same time I realize that it’s impossible to remember...

News Nanny: The Race to Censor Internet News If we don’t fight now, conservatives will vanish from the internet. November 10, 2017 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism. How can you tell that internet censorship is really taking off? Easy. It’s becoming a business model. Steven Brill is raising $6 million to launch News Guard. This new service will rate news sites on their trustworthiness from green to red. Forget politically unbiased algorithms. The ratings will be conducted by "qualified,...

Porn, spam and hate among the top reasons cited for blocking Facebook and Twitter users Canadian government departments have quietly blocked nearly 22,000 Facebook and Twitter users, with Global Affairs Canada accounting for nearly 20,000 of the blocked accounts, CBC News has learned. Moreover, nearly 1,500 posts — a combination of official messages and comments from readers — have been deleted from various government social media accounts since January 2016. However, there could be even more blocked accounts and deleted posts. In answer to questions tabled by Opposition MPs in the House of Commons, several departments said they don't keep...

For years Americans' right to privacy, as granted by the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, has come under threat as the country's surveillance systems have grown. After intelligence leaks by former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden, however, the NSA's domestic dragnet is finally getting the attention that many people feel it deserves.

WASHINGTON ― You may have seen this photo of President Donald Trump’s motorcade winding down a wooded road last week as a woman on a bicycle appeared to give it the bird. The picture, snapped by a White House photographer traveling with the president as he left his golf course in Sterling, Va., went viral almost immediately. News outlets picked up the story when it appeared in a White House pool report. Late-night talk show hosts told jokes about the encounter and people on social media began hailing the unidentified woman as a “she-ro,” using the hashtag #Her2020. The bicyclist’s...

ESPN distributed new social media guidelines to its employees Thursday, which reinforced some existing rules about not breaking news exclusively on social media, respecting colleagues, and—oh wait, here’s a new thing: “Do nothing that would undercut your colleagues’ work or embroil the company in unwanted controversy.” The “unwanted” there is doing a lot of work. Unwanted for whom? The employee who feels so strongly about an issue, perhaps the direction his or her employer is going, that they use Twitter to provide their insight? Of course not. The controversies are “unwanted” for ESPN executives, who want to keep advertisers happy,...

For a short time Thursday evening, Twitter appeared to lose one of its most avid users: The page for the @realDonaldTrump account displayed an error message. Twitter's standard error message, "Sorry, that page doesn't exist!" appeared in place of President Donald Trump's personal Twitter feed. A short time later, the account page reappeared and seemed to be functioning as normal. According to NBC News, the White House had no immediate comment. In May 2009, Trump, then a private businessman, sent his first tweet promoting a forthcoming appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman, the BBC reported.

Twitter buried significant portions of tweets related to hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta in the last two months of the 2016 presidential campaign. Twitter’s systems hid 48 percent of tweets using the #DNCLeak hashtag and 25 percent of tweets using #PodestaEmails, Twitter general counsel Sean Edgett said in his written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. “Approximately one quarter (25%) of [#PodestaEmails tweets] received internal tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches,” Edgett said. He added that “our systems detected and hid just under half (48%)...

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Germany has made no secret of its desire to see its new law copied by the rest of the EU. When employees of social media companies are appointed as the state's private thought police and given the power to shape the form of current political and cultural discourse by deciding who shall be allowed to speak and what to say, and who shall be shut down, free speech becomes nothing more than a fairy tale. Or is that perhaps the point? Perhaps fighting "Islamophobia" is now a higher priority than fighting terrorism? A new German law introducing state censorship...

Brad Parscale told 60 Minutes that Facebook employees worked right alongside the Trump 2016 campaign workers to help President Donald Trump win the presidency. Parscale is Trump’s digital director – and as seen in the below 60 Minutes video, Brad called Facebook the “500-pound gorilla,” taking up 80 percent of the digital budget. Meanwhile, people on Facebook and Twitter are calling it troubling that Parscale spoke of micro-targeted Facebook ads that helped Trump win the presidency. Especially troubling to folks unfamiliar with social media strategizing is the notion that Facebook employees were “embedded” in the Trump 2016 campaign, according to...

Maybe it’s because I’m so damn entertaining and knowledgeable. Maybe it’s because I provide so much love and attention. Maybe I AM Supermum. Who knows? Is there a magic mum formula, a secret to having two kids who DON’T do Facebook? Or Instagram? Or Twitter? Who aren’t self-obsessed selfie senders? Who aren’t vloggers ? They used to do some of them. USED to, mind. It’s the latest teenage trend as far as social media’s concerned.(snip) Apparently two-thirds of teens are sick of social media, with some going as far as to say they wouldn’t mind if it had never been...

'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia Google, Twitter and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks alarmed by a race for human attention by Paul Lewis in San Francisco Justin Rosenstein had tweaked his laptop’s operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook. But even that wasn’t enough. In August, the 34-year-old tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of...

Rupert Murdoch Is The Media’s Unlikely Hero In The War Against Facebook And Google Murdoch's bare-knuckle tactics are familiar to his many media enemies. Now his sights are set on Silicon Valley, and fellow media executives are starting to think the billionaire villain behind Fox News isn't so bad. Originally posted on October 4, 2017, at 8:48 p.m. Updated on October 5, 2017, at 5:12 a.m. Steven Perlberg Mark Di Stefano As the media industry girds for war with Silicon Valley’s powerful tech companies, its executives are coming to a painful realization: Rupert Murdoch saw it coming. The octogenarian Aussie...

The National Football League and Facebook today announced a multiyear deal to deliver official NFL video and other types of content to fans around the world. The NFL will publish NFL Game Recaps and official highlights from all 256 regular season games as well as the playoffs and Super Bowl that will be available to people globally on Facebook. In addition, NFL Media, the League's owned and operated media division, will distribute uniquely packaged content from its award-winning production arm, NFL Films, on Facebook's Watch platform. NFL Turning Point, Sound FX and NFL Game Recaps will be posted each week...

The Labor Day message from First Lady Melania Trump that was posted to social media was about 18 words long, but that didn’t stop Melania’s detractors from letting their feelings be known to Mrs. Trump. As seen on the Instagram page of FLOTUS, Melania passed on a message about honoring workers in the U.S. for contributing to the prosperity of the country. ““On this #LaborDay2017 we honor American workers for their many contributions to the prosperity of these United States.”” Within a short time, Melania began receiving all sorts of replies from her Instagram followers. Whereas some of Melania’s Instagram...

S tanding at almost 5’10” in my stocking feet, I’ve never been much for wearing high heels. I feel freakishly tall in them, but that’s never stopped me from envying women who can pull off towering pumps and sandals—particularly the sexy, spiky kind—because it is much harder than it looks. Gracefully navigating sidewalks, stairs, and dance floors on six-inch needles requires a type of agility and confidence—not to mention  sobriety—few women possess altogether and at once. So perhaps that’s why the claws came out at the sight of Melania Trump’s stilettos Tuesday morning. The first lady boarded Air Force One...

At this time 911 is not responding, and pleas for help are going out on social media. https://a.msn.com/r/2/AAqOnSF?m=en-us When the rainfall turned torrential late Saturday night, and water began pouring into his living room, KeRon Hooey sloshed down the block to the highest ground in the neighborhood: his neighbor’s two-story house. He and 10 others, including two elderly neighbors, spent the night on the second floor, watching the waters rising out of the nearby Buffalo Bayou and spreading across their quiet subdivision, Wood Shadows II. All night, Hooey dialed emergency numbers – 911, 311, the Coast Guard, local police stations...