Free Republic

Anti-free speech liberals have long sought to regulate and restrict Americans’ freedom of speech on the Internet. Now, their longtime champion, FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, has found her latest excuse to restrict American citizens’ free speech on their own websites, blogs, YouTube, and social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Speaking about Russian meddling in the last election at a recent meeting of the FEC (at minute 10:55), Weintraub stated: If you’re interested I’m happy to talk about it but I’m not here proposing that we reopen the entire Internet rulemaking from 2006. I think that’s something we might want...

Transylvania University’s president recently asked Congress to enact legislation that would force Facebook to “remove” any postings of “hate speech” from its website. In an essay for Inside Higher Ed, President Seamus Carey argues in favor of increased government regulation of “hate speech,” a request spurred on by the recent “harassment” of a DACA recipient at the university.

Google has followed the court order and blocked the app which is now inaccessible from the Spanish territory. "We remove content from our platforms when we receive a court order or when it violates our terms and conditions," the company said. The local authorities in Catalonia reiterated on Friday that the vote will go ahead as scheduled on Sunday, despite strong opposition from Madrid. Spanish authorities have been actively working to prevent the vote as thousands of additional police were deployed to the region, with orders to take control of the voting booths. Earlier this week, the organization managing the...

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Removing extremist content from the internet within a few hours of it appearing poses "an enormous technological and scientific challenge", Google's general counsel will say later on Wednesday to European leaders who want it taken down quicker. Kent Walker, general counsel for Alphabet Inc's Google, will speak on behalf of technology companies Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube at an event on the sidelines of the annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations. The leaders of France, Britain and Italy want to push social media companies to remove "terrorist content" from the internet within one to...

Luckily people moved to higher ground and there are no reports of injuries or deaths. An under construction Nam Ao Hydropower Project in Phaxay district, Xieng Khuang Province of Laos burst on September 11, 2017, causing severe flash flooding

Soviet leadership ordered John Paul II hit: Italian commission MOSCOW : Leaders of the former Soviet Union ordered the assassination bid on Pope John Paul II in 1981, the head of an Italian parliamentary commission announced. But the post-Soviet intelligence service of President Vladimir Putin immediately dismissed the allegation as an absurdity. Italian Senator Paolo Guzzanti said the findings of the commission showed "beyond all reasonable doubt" that Moscow's military secret service, the GRU, was responsible for the shooting as the late pope greeted pilgrims in St Peter's Square. The assertion, for years a favourite of conspiracy theorists in Italy,...

On Tuesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was pelted with tomatoes at an election rally in Heidelberg over her open door refugee policy. Video credit: RT Daily Mail UK reports: The 63-year-old Chancellor came under literal and actual fire from hundreds of protesters voicing their upset over her ‘open doors’ policy during the 2015 migrant crisis. Police said two tomatoes were thrown during different parts of the Chancellor’s speech with one striking her left hip. One of her aides was also hit by the flying fruit as the words ‘liar’ and ‘hypocrite’ rang in her ears. The noisy demonstration was fresh...

USA Today is touting a report out this morning that “ID’ed 4500 Trump golf-club members through” their social media accounts as well as an online service that lets golfers track their handicaps: Do they not see how awful this looks?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared last week that the social media site was dedicated to removing any content “that promotes or celebrates hate crimes.” Mark Zuckerberg posted to Facebook recently condemning the recent events at Charlottesville which saw three deaths over the course of the weekend as far-left and far-right protesters clashed. The Facebook CEO stated that the company would be watching out for rallies in the future, stating, “With the potential for more rallies, we’re watching the situation closely.” “We won’t always be perfect, but you have my commitment that we’ll keep working to make Facebook a place where...

DID you know that Google has been recording you without your knowledge? The technology giant has effectively turned millions of its users' smartphones into listening devices that can capture intimate conversations - even when they aren't in the room. If you own an Android phone, it's likely that you've used Google's Assistant, which is similar to Apple's Siri. Google says it only turns on and begins recording when you utter the words "OK Google". But a Sun investigation has found that the virtual assistant is a little hard of hearing. In some cases, just saying "OK" in conversation prompted it...

[Subtitle: German media claims Horst Mahler identified as an informant for East German secret police in leaked report into 1967 shooting]He is one of the most paradoxical and notorious figures in modern German history: a social democrat lawyer turned leftwing terrorist who went to prison, turned to Maoism and then came out as a far-right nationalist.Now there is another twist: Horst Mahler, a founding member of the Red Army Faction, was also a Stasi informant.According to German newspaper reports, the revelation comes from a leaked report by state prosecutors re-investigating the shooting of a pacifist by a Berlin policeman during...

Are you worried about the Russian influence on the presidential election? If so, there's a chance you are at least eight years too late. Consider the curious case of Rainer Baake, born in 1955 in the West German town of Witten. From his German Wikipedia entry (translated): After the Abitur (final high school examinations), Rainer Baake worked as a Community Organizer in Chicago from 1974 to 1978. So a 19 year old German went from a small town in Germany to be a community organiser in Chicago for four years. This is as strange as a 19-year-old African-American would be...

This war originated with President Trump’s winning of the 2016 Presidency, but I actually think it began some years back with the signing of the Patriot Act. That was the beginning of our loss of freedom, or that is what I think. Lets get a grip on what the Patriot Act meant to our freedoms, especially our freedom of speech; and then I will go on to the new Facebook news. https://wakeup-world.com/2015/01/22/the-first-amendment-the-real-patriot-act/ Throughout recorded time, oligarchical institutions – those where power is held by very few – have controlled, limited and restricted the five stages of patriotism in one way...

BERLIN — In a coordinated campaign across 14 states, the German police on Tuesday raided the homes of 36 people accused of hateful postings over social media, including threats, coercion and incitement to racism. ... The raids come as Germans are debating the draft of a new social media law aimed at cracking down on hate speech, a measure that an array of experts said was unconstitutional at a parliamentary hearing on Monday. ... According to Mr. Mihr, Germany’s current instruments for persecuting hate speech, as demonstrated by Tuesday’s raids, are working. “The raid shows that we don’t need this...

Donald Trump and Angela Merkel now agree about the main issues in U.S.-German relations. “The times in which we could rely fully on others — they are a way past us,” Merkel told a beer-tent rally of her political party. “We Europeans really have to take our fate into our own hands.” That is just what President Trump has been telling the Europeans since the beginning of last year’s U.S. election campaign, demanding in particular that Europe pay more for its own defense. Both Trump and Merkel, moreover, say they want the euro to strengthen against the U.S. dollar. That...

LIVING IN EAST Germany during the Cold War meant being watched. By your government. By your neighbors. And even, at times, by your own family. The East German secret police, one of the most intrusive and oppressive spying operations ever assembled, collected millions of files on people it suspected of being enemies of the state. The German Democratic Republic dissolved in 1990 with the fall of communism, but the documents assembled by the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, remain. This massive archive includes 69 miles of shelved documents, 1.8 million images, and 30,300 video and audio recordings housed in...

The World Wide Web needs a complete rethink to prevent spying and the spread of "nasty, mean ideas" on social media websites, its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, said on Monday. Berners-Lee, a London-born computer scientist who invented the Web as a platform on top of the internet in 1989, said his intention in building it had been for the public to "do good stuff" and share ideas among each other, as was the case with websites such as Wikipedia. Instead, negative ideas were proliferating on social media sites in particular, he said, while privacy was also being compromised by online spying....

Germany's justice minister is proposing fines of up to 50 million euros ($53 million) for social networking sites that fail to swiftly remove illegal content, such as hate speech or defamatory "fake news." The plan announced Tuesday marks a further step in Germany's attempt to impose its strict domestic laws against incitement on the free-wheeling world of online chatter. Justice Minister Heiko Maas, a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party, said social media companies had already taken voluntary steps to crack down on hate crimes that have resulted in improvements. "This isn't sufficient yet," Maas said, citing research that...

Germany is taking on Facebook, threatening criminal action against the world’s biggest social media company if it doesn’t stem the swelling tide of racist postings. Entries such as “gas the Jews” are examples of the repugnant postings... , said ... spokesman for the German Ministry of Justice. “Facebook doesn’t [react] unless they get complaints, or don’t remove it fast enough,”... “...is not just racist comment, it is a violation of Germany’s criminal code,” he said. “Facebook can be held criminally liable for users’ illegal hate speech.” German law prohibits speech that denies the Holocaust, disparages minorities, or insults public figures....

After the German Interior Minister put forth a bold plan on Tuesday to centralize the country’s security apparatus, conservative leaders at the state level have hit back. Bavarian Minister-President Horst Seehofer on Wednesday categorically rejected Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière’s plan to increase federal powers in domestic security. Germany’s domestic intelligence services are currently decentralized, divided between the federal government and the 16 individual state governments. But de Maizière wants to move the states’ powers to Berlin under the federal BfV intelligence service. […] Hesse interior minister Peter Beuth, CDU, called the reform plans “nonsense” and said such swift moves...