Free Republic

“Censorship by tech companies, esp censorship of conservative opinions,violates the spirit of the law & the 1st Amendment.But more regulation would go too far in the other direction,putting bureaucrats & lawyers in control of what gets said online. Either way, free speech loses.“

Future historians with an eye for inflection points may well focus on the Wall Street Journal of June 12, 2020. A page 1 banner reads, “Companies Pledge Actions to Promote Racial Justice” and recounts how in response to the George Floyd killing, Apple and Google are pledging millions to promote racial inclusion. Less than a week later, Google was more specific: allocating $175 million to sharply increase the number of black Google executives (30% by 2025), upping the firm’s anti-racism efforts, $100 million for black owned start-ups, $15 million for improved training for black job applicants and $3 million to...

Republican Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn penned a letter to Attorney General William Barr Monday urging the Department of Justice to conduct a thorough antitrust investigation into Google’s monopolistic power over the internet after the tech giant’s recent attack on The Federalist. “As your antitrust investigation of Google intensified, I urge you to thoroughly scrutinize how the company’s anticompetitive practices could lead to the crippling of journalistic freedom,” Blackburn wrote. “I also ask that your probe examine abuses in both the online advertising and online search markets, and to take enforcement action swiftly before further economic harm results.” The letter comes...

'Our hate speech policy prohibits videos which assert that someone’s sexuality or gender identity is a disease or a mental illness,' YouTube said in a statement. Information provided exclusively to The Federalist shows YouTube removed a Heritage Foundation video featuring testimony from a former transgender-identifying woman for violating the company’s hate speech policy. YouTube confirmed the decision in a Thursday email to The Federalist.Now Heritage is fighting back with a new video, released first to The Federalist, in which Federalist contributor Walt Heyer doubles down.“I said that children suffering from gender dysphoria should not be encouraged to try experimental hormones...

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., introduced legislation Wednesday to give Americans the ability to sue major tech companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter if they engage in selective censorship of political speech. The Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act, cosponsored by Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Mike Braun, R-Ind., and Tom Cotton, R-Ark., would stop such companies from receiving immunity under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, unless they update their terms of service to promise to operate in good faith. “For too long, Big Tech companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook have used their power to silence political...

The obscure British group that nearly forced Google to drop ads on The Federalist is continuing its efforts to demonetize American conservative media outlets it accuses of publishing inflammatory or racist content. The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), founded in 2019 by Labour party organizers, put out a call for donations Tuesday after NBC News reported that Google was poised to ban The Federalist and Zero Hedge, a libertarian-leaning website, from making money off of Google Ads. CCDH’s affiliate, “Stop Funding Fake News,” claimed on Wednesday that it had pressured Ford, the auto maker, to consider dropping ads on...

House Judiciary Committee Member Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., told "Tucker Carlson Tonight" Thursday that it is clear to him "big tech" will try to prevent President Trump from being reelected in November. Gaetz claimed that tech companies "buy off" members of Congress in order to maintain special privileges that local newspapers and television stations do not have. "That's why the president's executive order is one very important next step," he said. "If we just wait around, big tech will steal this election from Donald Trump and the American people." "In 2016 we won three Rust Belt states by one [percentage] point...

LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman, who notoriously backed a group that “spread disinformation during the 2017 Alabama special election for U.S. Senate,” is now being joined by other Big Tech billionaires in a plot to boost presumptive Democratic nominee for president Joe Biden in 2020.

Anti-Trump tweets by Yoel Roth, Twitter’s Head of Site Integrity since July 2018, are just the latest example of the extreme leftward slant and double standards held by those at the helm of Silicon Valley social media giants. The New York Post’s Jon Levine resurfaced tweets written by Roth in 2016 and 2017, not only poking fun at conservative leaders but also mocking the Americans who make up the geographic majority of the country. “I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voter for a racist tangerine for a reason,” the Twitter executive wrote the night of the 2016...

(TNS) — From France to Australia to North Dakota, government apps designed to help authorities track and slow the spread of COVID-19 are struggling to accomplish their goals because of restrictions on data collection built into smartphones by Apple Inc. and Google. That’s leaving public health officials with few options but to use a system designed by Apple and Google themselves. The tech companies say their tools preserve privacy and work seamlessly on devices used by some 3 billion people. Here’s the rub: Those same privacy features lock authorities out of collecting information they can use to track the broader...

Don’t be evil” was explicit to Google’s motto and code of conduct for some 15 years. In 2015, Google updated its motto to “Do the right thing.” Today, Google, which owns YouTube, seems to have altered its motto to “Be evil” or “Do the wrong thing”—including censoring free speech of doctors, scientists, professors, politicians and journalists whose ideas differ from those of Google executives. “This is the next step in the evolution of the Internet,” former Google CEO Eric Schmidt lauded Google’s purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006. We now know Schmidt’s definition of Internet “progress” ostensibly centers...

"In the great debate of the past two decades over freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong." So write Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods, law professors at Harvard and the University of Arizona, respectively, in The Atlantic. And they seem to mind, as their next sentence indicates: "Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society's norms and values." So much for the First...

How ironic that the 1984 iconic advertisement that Apple used to introduce the Macintosh computer "played on imagery from George Orwell's 1984 novella [sic] presenting Apple as rebels fighting a technocratic elite. The spot certainly was a lot gloomier than the company’s previous commercials, that used Apple celebrity spokesman Dick Cavett." In truth, "there was nothing cuddly about the new Macintosh ad, which was firmly rooted in the burgeoning dystopian cyberpunk aesthetic." Ostensibly the advertisement's intention was "to remove people’s fears of technology [.]" In fact, Apple claimed that they "wanted to democratize technology, telling people that the power was...

Facial recognition systems threaten our privacy. They can track where you go and add that information to the massive amount of information already saved about each of us. Big Brother is watching you and enabled by AI. And when it makes a mistake reading your face, you could end up with criminal charges far worse than when the toll tag system misreads your license plate. Here are several methods for fooling and interfering with facial recognition systems.

With the current coronavirus crisis creating a boom for video meetings, competition for secure platforms has become fierce. The recent controversies surrounding early frontrunner Zoom allowed Google to pounce at the opportunity, making rival Google Meet free to the general public. Google has begun positioning itself as the pro-privacy option because of supposed protections it has in place, even as many in the public remain skeptical. No protections in the world, however, will change that Google is a corporation whose whole business model revolves around tracking, mining, and selling personal user data, along with the history of privacy violations that...

Instead of being a vital technology empowering average people to learn and act for themselves, the internet now mostly succeeds in making users feel small, paranoid, and helpless. Some people might take issue with Facebook’s decision to remove posts attempting to organize protests against shelter-in-place orders, Twitter’s stance against presumed misinformation, and major news outlets acting as mouthpieces for the Chinese government. But by now, most people hardly blink at these heavy-handed moves to control public speech. They are told that dissent is either misinformation or hate speech, and, in the midst of a pandemic, such freedoms are positively dangerous.This...

Including the line ‘China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong’ discredits any piece of writing that discusses civil liberties and the rule of law. My former law professor Jack Goldsmith, now at Harvard Law School, and Andrew Keane Woods of the University of Arizona Law School, have a remarkable article in The Atlantic that defends technology companies’ surveillance and speech controls regarding coronavirus information. “Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet,” they write, “and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is...

There is a great debate going on in America about the power of big tech over our lives. One issue is whether they are going too far when they sell personal data collected by the company. Another issue is when they moderate content in a way that is perceived as discriminatory against conservatives. These are important issues and recent events show that these companies’ hands are not clean when it comes to privacy and censorship. Social media companies like Twitter and Facebook fill a networking and communications need felt by Americans, and because of their success, they have been handsomely...

Facebook didn't provide much confidence in its ability to navigate the uncharted waters of a pandemic in the age of Big Tech on Monday. Experiencing a pandemic on the scale of the Wuhan coronavirus in the age of Big Tech is a journey into uncharted territory, making the industryÂ’s often cozy relationship with the political class a recipe for new abuses of personal data and speech policing. Facebook didnÂ’t provide much confidence in its ability to navigate these waters on Monday. At first, the company seemed to be bragging about its work with state governments to remove posts promoting protests...

In the past, when federal contractors complained about the treatment they received from the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, agency officials would dare them to take it to the judge because “he works for us.” But Google took the dare – it took a complaint about harassment by the agency over alleged employee discrimination to an administrative law judge who works for the agency. And the judge agreed Google was right.Google said it turned over 740,000 pages of documents, at a cost of 2,300 man hours and $500,000, to address an inquiry by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance...