Free Republic

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from professor Peter St. Onge. Big Tech is slashing jobs—half a million and counting. And it’s blaming artificial intelligence. A new study by Layoffs.fyi reports that layoffs in the tech industry have exceeded 100,000 so far this year —and keep in mind that the year’s only half over. That’s on top of 212,000 tech layoffs last year. And 165,000 in 2022. Recent layoffs include Microsoft and Facebook, which each cut 10,000 jobs. Cisco dropped 4,000, Intuit 1,800. Even Amazon and Apple are laying off. Part of this is...

Before everything got disrupted by the attempt on President Trump’s life, I had written a post last week titled “Big Tech On The Path To Net Zero.” That post looked at the most recently issued “sustainability” reports from Google, Microsoft and Meta, and noted that all three admit to going rapidly in the opposite direction from “net zero.” As their businesses grow in the direction of power-hungry data centers and AI, they inevitably require large incremental amounts of always-available electricity — the kind of electricity that wind and sun cannot provide. Lacking viable alternatives to fossil fuels, their “emissions” rise....

I'm telling you that Barrett has decided she's a politician, not a Justice...' Tech companies are once again colluding with Democrats to push disinformation and censor legitimate conservative opinions, this time with the imprimatur of legitimacy conferred by the U.S. Supreme Court that allows them to do so more shamelessly and aggressively than ever. Today’s censorship is being made possible by the letters A, C and B—as in Justice Amy Coney Barrett. While the court’s two other centrists, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts, are equally culpable (along with its leftist bloc) in allowing the atrocity that is...

Google is up to its regular election tricks, according to the Media Research Center. An MRC investigation found that when searching for a candidates name with “presidential race 2024,” Joe Biden’s campaign website is the top result, while Donald Trump’s campaign website doesn’t appear on the first page. The MRC reports that as the 2024 presidential race heats up, concerns are growing about the role of technology giants in shaping public opinion and access to information. A recent investigation MRC has uncovered what they claim to be evidence of bias in Google’s search results, potentially impacting the visibility of presidential...

SCOTUS Green-Lights Feds’ Big Tech Censorship Scheme Ahead Of 2024 Election‘We therefore reverse the judgment of the Fifth Circuit and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.’The U.S. Supreme Court reversed a lower court’s injunction prohibiting the federal government from colluding with Big Tech companies to censor posts it doesn’t like, effectively green-lighting the Biden administration’s ability to carry out such operations during the 2024 election. “To establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a Government defendant and redressable by the...

The Supreme Court struck down a lower court’s injunction preventing the federal government from pressuring Big Tech companies to suppress free speech in a pivotal ruling Wednesday. The court did not rule on the question of whether the government may pressure social media companies to suppress speech in a way that would be illegal for the government to do itself. Instead, the court ruled that the plaintiffs failed to establish Article III standing to bring the case. “We begin—and end—with standing,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion for Murthy v. Missouri. “At this stage, neither the individual...

@Nigel_Farage 🚨 ELECTION INTERFERENCE ALERT 🚨 Big Tech giant @Google has BLOCKED our Ad Accounts. They are trying to stop the Reform message. I hope @MattBrittin can look into this issue as a matter of urgency. We want action.

Are America’s intelligence agencies being used to silence citizens and influence elections? Mike Benz, Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom and a former State Department official, explains who he views as the main actors behind the industry of Big Tech censorship and what should be done to preserve freedom of speech in the U.S.

The State Department didn’t respond when pressed on whether it’s colluding with Big Tech to censor so-called ‘disinformation.’. he State Department is refusing to say whether it is communicating with Big Tech platforms to censor free speech online leading up to the 2024 election. The agency’s silence on the matter came after The Federalist asked about a new working group launched by the United States and Poland on Monday that seeks to counter Russian “disinformation” about Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Called the “Ukraine Communications Group (UCG),” the body will involve the two aforementioned countries and representatives from NATO states,...

Apple’s efforts to narrow its artificial intelligence gap with rivals by partnering with OpenAI did little to move Wall Street. The iPhone maker’s stock price fell about 2% in Monday after-hours trading. ... Apple’s deal with OpenAI has enraged Elon Musk, who threatened to ban Apple devices from his companies — namely Tesla, SpaceX, and X. Why? On June 10 Musk called the Apple/OpenAI deal “an unacceptable security violation,” CNBC reported.

The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024. Smaller-sized startups have also seen a fair amount of cuts, and in some cases, have shut down operations altogether.By tracking these layoffs, we’re able to understand the impact on innovation across companies large and small. We’re also able to see the potential impact of businesses embracing...

Acting out of ideological and financial "anti-competitive animus," federal agencies, Big Tech and purported anti-disinformation groups collaborated to squelch publishers that promote narratives at odds with COVID-19 treatment orthodoxy, a new First Amendment lawsuit alleges. The federal complaint by Natural News publisher Webseed and its companion Brighteon Media, whose holdings include websites for original and aggregated video and artificial intelligence large language models, joins other anti-censorship lawsuits against the State Department and its Global Engagement Center, NewsGuard and social media. It makes similar allegations as suits against State by the conservative Daily Wire and The Federalist, whose presiding judge greenlit...

This summer the Supreme Court will rule on a case involving what a district court called perhaps "the most massive attack against free speech" ever inflicted on the American people. In Murthy v. Missouri, plaintiffs ranging from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to epidemiologists from Harvard and Stanford allege that the federal government violated the First Amendment by working with outside groups and social media platforms to surveil, flag, and quash dissenting speech – characterizing it as mis-, dis- and mal-information – on issues ranging from COVID-19 to election integrity. The case has helped shine a light on...

Artificial intelligence scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “Godfather of AI,” is urging the British government to enforce a universal basic income (UBI) to cope with the impact of AI technology. Universal basic income is a social welfare system in which the government provides every citizen with a standard minimum income. These payments are unconditional and transferred to citizens on a regular basis without any pre-qualification. The concept is in keeping with the Marxist ideal of wealth redistribution and has been proposed by socialist figures such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Hinton told BBC Newsnight that a universal basic income...

Are you posting about the shocking assassination attempt on Wednesday upon the Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico? Well, a warning. You and the Big Tech platform you are posting on can be punished for spreading "disinformation' if the European Commission, the increasingly authoritarian cabinet government of the European Union, has its way.On Thursday, Bloomberg published the warning of impending EU censorship on this topic in an article by Peter Chapman and Samuel Stolton in "EU Monitoring ‘Spread of Disinformation’ on Fico Shooting."

A massive effort spearheaded by a censorship-obsessed group financed by leftist billionaire George Soros is looking to incorporate global pressure to push Big Tech platforms to juice their censorship operations before the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Free Press, a Soros-funded media group that claimed responsibility for helping get former President Donald Trump banned from Twitter, is at the helm of a new push to restrict free speech online. “More Than 200 Groups Urge Leading Tech Platforms to Implement Election-Integrity Policies to Protect Democracy Worldwide,” Free Press blared in its Apr. 9 press release on a new co-signed letter by groups...

An investor at famed Silicon Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz is the latest VC to get involved in the debate around "fake work" in the tech industry. In an interview published Monday with Emily Sundberg for her Substack newsletter "Feed Me," Andreessen Horowitz general partner David Ulevitch called Google "an amazing example" of a corporation employing people in "BS jobs." "As we (society / our economy) prioritize conglomerates and megacorps, irrelevant jobs proliferate," he said. "Anyone who works in a 10,000+ person or larger white-collar job company knows that a bunch of the people can probably be let go tomorrow and...

Not included were social media companies such as Meta Platforms and X. The chief executives of leading US technology companies are joining a new artificial intelligence safety board to advise the federal government on how to protect the nation’s critical services from “AI-related disruptions”. Homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced the new board, which includes key corporate leaders in AI development such as OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang. AI holds potential for improving government services but “we recognise the tremendously debilitating impact its errant...

As federal net-zero policies attempt to shift transportation, heating, and other essentials onto the electric grid, one of the hottest growth sectors of America’s economy is poised to increase electricity demand exponentially, further straining an energy infrastructure that is being pushed into the red. Data centers, the so-called “brains of the internet,” are industrial warehouses packed with rows upon rows of servers. They process, communicate, and store the data behind everything from bank records, online retailers, and social media platforms to Netflix shows and your personal iPhone videos. “Data centers are essential to cloud computing and its ability to give...

There’s this meme that’s been cracking everyone up online. It jokes that AI isn’t some next-level tech marvel. Instead, picture this: 5,000 people in India, just sitting around, answering all our queries. It’s a funny take on the whole AI scene and pokes fun at the idea that maybe, just maybe, the big players like Big Tech, Big Pharma, and the government are pulling one over on us.