Free Republic

Big tech censorship is out of control and it's getting Orwellian. It happened in a hurry. The Left is, apparently, attempting to impose the complete destruction of First Amendment rights of roughly half of America’s citizens. In cases large and small, massive multinational corporations with no particular allegiance to the United States are colluding with members of the media and Democratic politicians to permanently silence dissent and cement their own power. To wit: LeeAnn Miller founded PatrioticMe, an online retailer that sells patriotic clothing items, in September of last year. The business advertised on Facebook and was quite successful from...

Late last week, after a "fiery but mostly peaceful protest" in Washington DC, a slew of Big Tech media companies including Amazon, Twitter, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Reddit began deplatforming — i.e., censoring, dropping, un/dehosting (I can make up words, too), banning, dropping, purging, suspending from their sites — sometimes permanently — people and/or institutions with whom they disagreed, most prominently President Trump (R). Twitter Safety lamely justified its censorious action:After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.In...

Big Tech's rush to take down and ban social media accounts or de-platform entire websites that they believe in some way caused the horrible rioting at the Capitol is based on fear -- that Joe Biden's inauguration will devolve into another riot. Or that there will be riots at state capitols. Social media platforms such as Twitter are only focused on President Donald Trump and his millions of devoted fans. They don't seem to focus on violent thoughts on the left, most prominently the Hollywood left. Apparently, their violent thoughts are never plausibly dangerous; no one could ever be incited...

ATT sent the following letter to it's employees. This is a letter telling ATT employees they will contribute the the ATT/WarnerMedia Federal PAC or else. Won't be long before they'll have them filling out absentee ballots under a managers supervision. This is bad. To All PAC-Eligible Employees: A critical component of our company’s efforts to be a responsible corporate citizen is actively participating in the political process. We do this in a variety of ways, including through corporate and employee political action committee (PAC) contributions consistent with our core values. Employees on our Federal PAC Board recently convened a call...

Political elites worldwide have criticized big tech companies for banning President Donald Trump from their social media platforms. At present, the president has been banned from Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, Reddit, and Instagram. Twitter permanently removed Trump’s account, saying that his recent posts were in violation of the “Glorification of Violence Policy.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel called Twitter’s ban on Trump “problematic,” and said that freedom of opinion is an essential right of “elementary significance,” her spokesperson, Steffen Siebert, said on Jan 11. “This fundamental right can be intervened in, but according to the law and within the framework defined...

Bouncing off of what I posted yesterday, I think it might be a wise discussion to have that we can use the progressives' own rules against them. Alinsky 101 if you will. Progressives have set it up so that when we purchase software, we subsidize progressivism, and opensecrets.org proves this to be an undeniable truth. Well, then, clearly the opposite is also the truth. When we use free open source software, progressivism subsidizes us. Your bank account is to smile upon thee. Are you subsidized by progressivism? You can be. Maybe embracing "free stuff" isn't so bad after all.

U.S.—Donald Trump was permanently banned from Twitter today, being a crazy fringe extremist who also happens to be the president of the United States. But the ever-clever Trump, always known as the smartest man in the room, has managed to get back on the social network by disguising himself as one Chongald Xrump, PR specialist for the Chinese Communist Party. Trump is reportedly attempting to build a following by tweeting about how good Uighur concentration camps are and how nice the Chinese government is, since those things are not banned under Twitter's terms of service. Once he has enough followers,...

The violent storming of the capitol cannot be condoned but it must be explained as so many posturing Trump critics and hater are unwilling to do. Just what do we expect to happen when 75 million Americans are told their votes don't matter and can stolen without consequence or concern, that their voices don't matter and can be silenced at will and that now they must be punished for supporting the candidate of their choice in a former free republic. As I write this, Parler, the touted alternative to the Big Tech monopoly and oligarchy, has been knocked off the...

What we are up against here is a threat to our freedom of speech which, like digital technology itself, is not quite like anything we’ve seen before. On the one hand, digital media has furnished us with wholly new ways of relating to one another and engaging with the world. On the other, a small cadre of despotic tycoons has now achieved a wholly new kind of stranglehold on public discourse. It is a novel form of attack upon the American way of life, and it will require a novel form of response. The monopoly that people like Jack Dorsey,...

It is “axiomatic,” the Supreme Court held in Norwood v. Harrison (1973), that the government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” That’s what Congress did by enacting Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which not only permits tech companies to censor constitutionally protected speech but immunizes them from liability if they do so.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday addressed the social media censorship and his Twitter accounts being deleted following the breach at the U.S. Capitol last week.“People thought that what I said was totally appropriate,” Trump told reporters in response to the Big Tech backlash for his speech on Jan. 6 to protesters. “We want no violence … absolutely no violence,” he said.He made the remarks to reporters at the White House ahead of his departure to Alamo, Texas—the first public comments to reporters since he delivered a speech to protesters near the Capitol on Jan. 6.The president also warned that the...

Democrats and their media allies are milking a tragic riot for all it's worth.The Democrats and their media allies are trying to convince the American people that President Donald Trump is guilty of inciting an insurrection last week. In both legal terms and in terms of the plain meaning of the English language, their claim is absurd on its face. There are two fundamental reasons for this: Trump did not incite the riots at the Capitol, and the riots were not an insurrection.The Standard for IncitementLegally speaking, incitement has an incredibly high bar that none of Trump’s actions since the...

Earlier today on my radio show I spoke with Parler CPO Amy Peikoff on Big Tech’s combined efforts to run Parler off of the Internet. Watch the simulcast from The First:

What are they afraid of? Imagine a 250-pound boxer being so petrified of a 100-pound woman that he had to get his entire motorcycle gang and the local police department to hold her down while she was unarmed so he could beat her. Well, if you are having trouble conjuring up such an image, you likely don't realize that is what is happening to conservatives today.

They are among the biggest - and most generous - backers of the renewable energy shift. They are advertising themselves as environmentally responsible companies that source their raw materials from ethical locations and cutting the offering of products that consumers don't use to reduce packaging-related emissions.And they are the driver behind a global electronic waste crisis. Meet Big Tech. Last year, Apple said its iPhone 12 will sell without a charging adapter, like the latest Apple Watches, to reduce the amount of electronic waste its products generate."There are also over 2 billion Apple power adapters out there in the world,...

Here is my "brilliant" idea. Stay on sites like FB. But post on a regular basis that you REFUSE to do business with ANY of their advertisers. It is very simple to do. And, if enough people did it, it should send a clear message that makes BT (and their sponsors) nervous. Meanwhile, you continue using their resources.

Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler? Zero. The planning was largely done on Facebook. This is all a bullshit pretext for silencing competitors on ideological grounds: just the start.

In the aftermath of Wednesday’s Capitol riot, Big Tech went nuclear. Most prominently, Facebook and Twitter suspended President Trump’s accounts on their platforms: Facebook’s suspension will last though the president’s remaining time in office, while Twitter’s ban is permanent. Trump was not the only prominent conservative figure suspended: former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and his lawyer Sidney Powell were also banned from Twitter. Naturally, focus shifted to Parler, the most prominent of the “free-speech” alternatives to Facebook and Twitter. After President Trump’s suspensions, traffic to the site soared; consequently, left-wing activists demanded that Google and Apple pull Parler from...

I had to think a bit about this. For those of you less than 30 years old, when the internet was in it's infancy, there was a whole lot of things going on. Did you ever do an Archie search? How about utilizing Gopher menu's? The only three web browsers for DOS6.22/Win3.11 were Mozilla, Netscape, and Lynx. But there were, and still are, places on the internet that big tech doesn't own and can't own because it's too decentralize. For the the geeks like me, BBS'ing was where we started. This was the mid-80's. Imagine, posting a message on a...

Watching mealy-mouthed, frothy-lipped, knuckle-dragging d*ckheads cheer the silencing of thousands and thousands of conservatives on social media by the ‘West Coast Big Tech’ companies has been disheartening. Totally expected but still, you’d think by now they’d have learned that things always swing back the other way. Not to mention the same big tech authoritarians who took down Parler may someday come for them. Elon Musk spelled it out in one short but sweet tweet. Elon Musk @elonmusk "A lot of people are going to be super unhappy with West Coast high tech as the de facto arbiter of free speech"...