Free Republic

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden ripped Facebook in a tweet Saturday after the social media giant suspended Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm which worked worked for President Trump’s campaign. Facebook accused the firm on Friday of not deleting data it had improperly harvested from Facebook users, which number in the tens of millions, but Snowden pinned the blame squarely on Facebook and lumped in other social media companies for being just as reckless. "Businesses that make money by collecting and selling detailed records of private lives were once plainly described as 'surveillance companies,'" Snowden said. "Their rebranding...

Today is the 3rd and final day of the government-sponsored conference for pro-Israel online activists, that is being referred to as #DigiTell18. Last week, 4IL, a project of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, announced that the conference would be held this week, but offered few details apart from the following, general description: “A Global Gathering of Pro-Israel Social Media Experts” 4IL, made the following anticipatory tweet in advance of the conference, “Participants from 15 countries & with over 20 million people in social media reach will gather next week in Jerusalem for a one of a kind event.” [See tweet...

My daughter is ten. She wants me to download the Musical.ly app on my phone so she can make funny lip-sync videos. Everyone has it, she whines, even the kid whose mom is an FBI agent/social worker/pediatrician/nun. Wow. Well. In that case… I download the app while she’s at school but it won’t let me explore without an account. I create a profile under Chardonaynay47, only to delete that and opt for something less momish — gummibear9.

Even millennials are getting sick of Instagram. More than half of users between the ages of 18 and 24 revealed they are “seeking relief from social media,” according to a survey. The poll, taken in December, found that 34 percent of young users reported having deleted social-media accounts entirely. Forty-one percent of respondents said they waste too much time on social media, and 35 percent agreed that people their age are too distracted by their online lives. The most popular apps to quit permanently are Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as the dating app Tinder. Snapchat, on the other...

Aside from a giant overreach into our personal lives that seems like regular business for Facebook, Zuckerberg’s team is realizing that our privacy and control of how facebook works is more in focus. Regardless of how much you use Facebook and the last time that you looked, take a moment to review this constantly changing area and give yourself a facebook privacy tune-up.

Last week I made brief appearance on a TV news show out of New York. The subject was censorship on Twitter. GrrrGraphics lost 2,000 in the sudden and silly ‘Russian bot purge,’ but we gained most of them back (and more) by the next day. We knew people who were banned for no particular reason other than their connections to conservative leaders on social media. Tweeting pro-Trump messages is intrinsic proof of Russian bots, right? Hillary thinks it is. Such anti-Russia hysteria also diverts attention away from her crimes.We are one of the few to obtain the coveted blue check...

When Lissette Calveiro moved to New York from Miami in 2013, for an internship, she felt like she was living the “Sex and the City” dream. The now-26-year-old was having brunch with friends and buying new outfits online — and documenting it all on her Instagram account. “I wanted to tell my story about this young millennial living in New York,” Calveiro, who has more than 12,000 followers on Instagram, told The Post. “I was shopping . . . for clothes to take ‘the perfect ’gram.’ ”

The Christian satire site Babylon Bee has been fact-checked by Snopes and threatened by Facebook after it published an Onion-style article about CNN about purchasing a washing machine to “spin the news.” The Babylon Bee openly advertises itself as a satire site. Recent headlines include, “Local Pastor Hoping Curling Metaphors Go Over Big This Sunday,” “Nation That Calls Trump ‘Hitler’ Demands He Take All Guns Away,” “Calvinist Dog Corrects Owner: ‘No One Is A Good Boy’,” and “New Exercise Bike Forces You To Watch Christian Movies Until You Hit Your Calories Goal.” Not only is this fairly anodyne stuff, but...

YouTube has blamed "newer members" of it's 10,000 person fleet of content moderators for a virtual bloodbath of video takedowns, strikes, and account restrictions taking place across a large cross-section of conservative channels. The Google division announced the new moderators in December, tasked with spotting said fake news, along with misleading or extreme content in the wake of a raging debate over the effect of propaganda and inaccurate reporting after Hillary Clinton's 2016 election loss. Google essentially responded to the crackdown on conservatives with "our bad," after news of the mass censorship began to spread. "As we work to hire...

To err is human, or at least that’s what they say. But the question is, how come that Internet behemoths like Google/YouTube, Facebook and Twitter always make ‘mistakes’ when it comes to their right wing users, Donald Trump (whose Twitter account was ‘deleted’ by mistake recently) included? This question has an obvious and not very politically correct answer, but I’ll let you sort it out on your own. Today we learned that Google owned YouTube ‘accidentally’ deleted a number of conservative/right wing channels and/or videos, following the Florida high-school massacre. Obviously, Google claims it was done by mistake, but all...

Your digital footprint — how often you post on social media, how quickly you scroll through your contacts, how frequently you check your phone late at night — could hold clues to your physical and mental health. That is the theory behind an emerging field, digital phenotyping, that is trying to assess people’s well-being based on their interactions with digital devices. Researchers and technology companies are tracking users’ social media posts and clicks in search of behavior changes that could correlate with disease symptoms. Some of these services are opt-in. At least one is not. People typically touch their phones...

Emma Gonzalez, a senior at Majory Stoneman Douglas High School — where 17 people were shot and killed two weeks ago — is quickly gaining visibility as a gun violence prevention activist. And on Saturday, the teen’s already powerful impact became even more apparent as she surpassed the NRA in Twitter followers. The 18-year-old rose to prominence after giving an 11-minute speech at an anti-gun rally in Fort Lauderdale two days after the mass shooting, and for standing up to NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch at a town hall hosted by CNN. This weekend, Twitter users noticed that Gonzalez had more...

Orono Police Chief Correy Farniok said one juvenile was arrested at Orono High School Wednesday afternoon in connection to a pair of social media posts that caused a lockdown of Orono schools. Farniok said the juvenile arrested was one of two persons of interest who have been identified in the matter. He said both suspects, who were identified as students, were holed up in Orono High School during the lockdown. Police were informed around 10:57 a.m. Wednesday of a pair of threats made on social media threatening a shooting at Orono schools at noon. That led to a lockdown which...

** Pamela Geller has more. During the election The Gateway Pundit was the fourth most influential conservative news source. Following the 2016 election Harvard and Columbia Journalism Review funded research (with money from the Soros Open Society) to find out what happened. What they found was that conservative Americans whole-heartedly rejected the liberal media and went online and to social media to find the truth. The university researchers found that The Gateway Pundit was the 4th most influential conservative news source during the election. (Behind Breitbart, FOX News, The Hill — and, of course, Matt Drudge and The Drudge Report)...

President Obama's role during the Israeli elections was larger than reported, according to a pollster for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party. "What was not well reported in the American media is that President Obama and his allies were playing in the election to defeat Prime Minister Netanyahu," John McLaughlin, a Republican strategist, said in an interview on John Catsimatidis's "The Cats Roundtable" radio show broadcast Sunday on AM 970 in New York. "There was money moving that included taxpayer U.S. dollars, through non-profit organizations. And there were various liberal groups in the United States that were raising millions...

New York state’s highest court ruled on Tuesday that Facebook users may be required to turn over photos and other information that are relevant to litigation, even if they are shielded by “privacy” settings. By a 7-0 vote, the Court of Appeals reinstated a trial judge’s ruling requiring a Manhattan woman who was disabled in a horse riding accident to turn over to the defendant horse owner an array of photos taken before and after her injuries. Noting “significant controversy” over what information on Facebook deserves privacy protection, Chief Judge Janet DiFiore said it is appropriate to require disclosure of...

With mom, dad and grandma signing up in increasing numbers, Facebook is losing younger users in the United States at a faster pace than previously estimated, researchers said Monday. A report by eMarketer said Snapchat is drawing youths away from Facebook at a quicker clip than Facebook-owned Instagram. Facebook is still growing in the US market, according to research firm, mainly due to increases in usage by older age groups. The report is the latest to highlight Facebook's problem with attracting and keeping young people, who have long been a core user base for the world's biggest social network. The...

The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI believe they don't need a search warrant to review Americans' e-mails, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and other private files, internal documents reveal. Government documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and provided to CNET show a split over electronic privacy rights within the Obama administration, with Justice Department prosecutors and investigators privately insisting they're not legally required to obtain search warrants for e-mail. The IRS, on the other hand, publicly said last month that it would abandon a controversial policy that claimed it could get warrantless access to e-mail correspondence....

Having been one of the early targets of social media censorship on Facebook, YouTube et al, I have advocated for anti-trust action against these bullying behemoths. It is good to see establishment outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and National Review coming to the same conclusion, or at least asking the same questions. Just this week, Facebook launched its latest of many attacks on my news site, the Geller Report. It labeled my site as "spam" and removed every Geller Report post -- thousands upon thousands of them, going back years – from Facebook. It also blocked any Facebook...

Trust in social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter has reached a new low, a major credibility survey has warned, over concerns they do not do enough to tackle bullying, illegal activities and the spreading of extremist content on their sites. Most people think the online companies are not regulated enough (64 percent) and lack transparency (63 percent), according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. Just over half (57 percent) believe social media firms take advantage of users’ loneliness, and 62 percent think they are selling people’s data without their knowledge. A third (34 percent) do not think social media...