Free Republic

(FBI) visited a woman on February 22 who had used social media to expose a man who allegedly ‘dumped her cousin’s body like trash’ and was released on probation. The tweet posted by Twitter user Kristin Martin has gone viral and has been viewed over 8.6 million times. The tweet in question was a call for justice for her 27-year-old cousin, Macy Peebles, who Martin alleges was drugged by a man at L’Auberge Casino in Baton Rouge and later found dead. The accused, Damion Matthews, is currently on probation despite having a criminal history. Martin’s tweet reads: “This monster drugged...

The National Science Foundation is paying universities using taxpayer money to create AI tools that can be used to censor Americans on various social media platforms, according to members of the House. University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and MIT are among the universities cited in the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government interim report. It details the foundation’s “funding of AI-powered censorship and propaganda tools, and its repeated efforts to hide its actions and avoid political and media scrutiny.” “NSF has been issuing multi-million-dollar grants to university and non-profit research...

"FBI shows up on this woman’s porch after Meta flagged her pro-Palestine activity on Facebook Welcome to freedom" SNIP What the media hides Twitter (4min video)

The Washington Post Editorial Board went to bat for the federal government colluding with Big Tech to police so-called disinformation online. Gatestone Institute Senior Fellow Gordon Chang was having none of it. “Don’t defund the fight against Russia and China’s disinformation,” decried the Board in the editorial. In the editorial, the Board defended the State Department-tied Global Engagement Center’s financing of the now-infamous Global Disinformation Index (initially based in the U.K.), which has since been panned for blacklisting right-leaning American media. The Post propagandized how the GEC “deploys a $61 million budget and a staff of 125 to counter disinformation...

The FDA has agreed to delete and never republish several social-media posts suggesting that ivermectin, a drug that some doctors used to treat COVID-19, is for animals and not humans. While the FDA still does not approve of using ivermectin to treat COVID, it settled Thursday a lawsuit brought by three doctors who sued it, as well as the Department of Health and Human Services and its secretary, Xavier Becerra, and FDA secretary Robert Califf. All parties have settled. The lawsuit, filed on June 2, 2022, was brought by doctors Mary Talley Bowden, Paul Marik and Robert Apter, each of...

Free speech is on trial at the Supreme Court, but Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson is no fan of the First Amendment. The Constitution, you see, limits the government. But leftists want unlimited government — which is why they hate the Constitution. During Monday’s oral arguments for Murthy v. Missouri, formerly known as Biden v. Missouri, Jackson claimed to oppose any ruling in favor of Americans’ constitutional right to free speech if it limited the government’s ability to censor that speech via Big Tech. “My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways...

Police have two persons of interest in connection with the shooting death of a 13-year-old boy in Brooklyn that was apparently revenge for an Instagram live beating that the young boy was not involved in, according to police sources. Troy Gill was just a few blocks from his home in Crown Heights near Brooklyn Avenue and St. Marks Avenue around 10 p.m. on Feb. 29 when he was shot four times by rival gang members and left for dead, cops said. The boy had been to a Nets game earlier that night and desperately called his mother as he fled...

Six eighth-grade students in Southwick, Massachusetts have been criminally charged for their involvement in an alleged “hateful and racist” Snapchat group chat. According to Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni, the group chat in question featured appalling language and behavior, including a mock slave auction and derogatory remarks aimed at people of color. The existence of the group chat and the comments made were first reported to school authorities at Southwick Regional School. Upon learning about the group chat, Gulluni notified the Massachusetts State Police Detective Unit to launch an investigation. Subsequently, he authorized the Detective Unit and the Chief of...

A conservative social media influencer is facing federal charges for allegedly breaching the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and helping pass a stolen table out a broken window, according to court records made public Monday. Isabella Maria DeLuca, who boasts more than 333,000 followers on X, was arrested last Friday in California, more than three years after the chaos at the Capitol. The 24-year-old Long Island native and former congressional intern was one of several rioters who allegedly passed a table from a US Senate terrace room to others outside the building that was then used against law enforcement,...

This morning the Supreme Court held oral argument in the case that is now styled Murthy v. Missouri. C-SPAN has posted audio of the oral argument here. The case arises from the government’s “encouragement” of censorship by the social media platforms, as documented in the Twitter Files. We have followed the case as it has wended its way through the district court to the Fifth Circuit and then to the Supreme Court. We (I) have been pulling for the plaintiffs. The Supreme Court has already entered an order staying the narrowed preliminary injunction that had been fashioned by the Fifth...

the appeals panel agreed that several federal offices and agencies, including the White House .. violated the First Amendment by coercing the platforms’ content moderation decisions. ... A federal appeals court ... finding that several agencies likely violated the First Amendment. ... The original case was brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, who alleged that federal officials unduly pressured social media firms to limit speech on their platforms, as they communicated concerns about posts related to the Covid pandemic or elections. ... The decision had an immediate impact. Following the district court’s order in July, the State...

Former MSNBC bomb thrower Keith Olbermann is taking heat for posting to social media his apparent hope that Donald Trump would be assassinated. The shrill, extreme leftist jumped to his X account on Saturday and replied to a Joe Biden campaign post which featured a video of a segment of a speech Trump recently made in Dayton, Ohio. The “Biden-Harris HQ” post of the video was captioned: “Trump says he has been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated.”

A unanimous Supreme Court ruled Friday that public officials can sometimes be sued for blocking their critics on social media, an issue that first arose for the high court in a case involving then-President Donald Trump. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the court, said that officials who use personal accounts to make official statements may not be free to delete comments about those statements or block critics altogether. On the other hand, Barrett wrote, "State officials have private lives and their own constitutional rights." The court ruled in two cases involving lawsuits filed by people who were blocked after...

WASHINGTON, March 15 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court, addressing free speech rights in the digital age, decided on Friday that government officials can sometimes be sued under the Constitution's First Amendment for blocking critics on social media. In unanimous decisions in two cases from California and Michigan, the justices set a new standard for determining if public officials acted in a governmental capacity when blocking critics on social media - a test to be applied in lawsuits accusing them of violating the First Amendment. First Amendment protections for free speech generally constrain government actors, not private individuals. Under the...

China has responded to the new U.S. House bill passed against TikTok, and it doesn't look like it's going to make the U.S.-Sino relationship any better. While the measure still has to wind its way through the Senate, it would essentially ban the platform for all Americans unless TikTok's operations were divested from Chinese parent firm ByteDance (BDNCE). The formal name of the bill, titled the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act," also likely riled Beijing, which was quick to lay out its position and accuse Washington of "resorting to acts of bullying."Quote: "Though the U.S. has never...

The House voted on Wednesday to pass a bill that could lead to a nationwide ban against TikTok, a major challenge to one of the world’s most popular social media apps. The bill would prohibit TikTok from US app stores unless the social media platform — used by roughly 170 million Americans — is spun off from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. It’s not yet clear what the future of the bill will be in the Senate. Lawmakers supportive of the bill have argued TikTok poses a national security threat because the Chinese government could use its intelligence laws against...

The House on Wednesday passed legislation that would ban TikTok if they do not sell the company from its Chinese parent company. The House voted 352-61-1 H.R. 7521, Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. The bill featured 15 Republicans against the bill, 50 Democrats against it, showing that there is strong bipartisan interest in curbing TikTok’s apparent national security threat.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) cited her previous ban on Twitter, the platform now known as X, in opposing legislation that could ban TikTok on Wednesday. “I rise today as the only member of Congress that has ever been banned by social media,” Greene said on the House floor, as the lower chamber prepared to vote on the bill. “Twitter banned me, banned my personal account on which I was campaigning for Congress, raising money and using my free speech to inform the voters in my district they can vote for me,” she continued. “This was not by a company...

Here’s what’s actually going on with the TikTok fight right now. Deep State toadies are taking advantage of anti-China sentiment to transfer TikTok’s surveillance apparatus from China’s evil surveillance state to the U.S. government’s evil surveillance state. TikTok isn’t going to be banned, because neither the CCP-run Chinese government nor the CCP-owned U.S. government wants to lose such a valuable tool for spying on Americans and poisoning the minds of their children. Instead, the corrupt U.S. intelligence bureaucracy wants control of TikTok, which is why it included the divestment mandate. Only a handful of U.S. companies are capable of buying...

@RepThomasMassie The so-called TikTok ban is a trojan horse. The President will be given the power to ban WEB SITES, not just Apps. The person breaking the new law is deemed to be the U.S. (or offshore) INTERNET HOSTING SERVICE or App Store, not the “foreign adversary.”