Free Republic

A Republican leader has decided to take on Big Tech. It’s high time. While other Republican legislators complain and pontificate about Twitter, Facebook and Google’s interference in our elections and censoring of conservative voices, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has declared war on the tech giants. DeSantis is proposing legislation that asks the Florida state legislature to impose stiff fines – up to $100,000 per day – on tech companies that “deplatform” political candidates running for office in his state. Candidates like, for instance, Donald Trump.

In a passage in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, a character named Mike is asked how he went bankrupt. “Gradually,” he replies. “Then all at once.”Such a framing could also describe the raw power of Big Tech, which has been evolving over the last two decades into what can accurately be described as an oligopoly (when a market is dominated entirely by a handful of firms). That power was fully unleashed last month. After playing footsie for the last decade with their massive market and narrative control over America, Big Tech finally shed any pretext of restraint or deference...

A leftist journalist expressed regret about calling for Silicon Valley to censor content after it happened to him. Progressive reporter Jordan Chariton had the change of heart after YouTube took down one of his videos. Chariton’s original advocacy for censorship occurred when he called for Big Tech giants to target anyone who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. “EVERY media outlet that pushed this INSANE election fraud conspiracy for clicks should be taken off the air. They’ve incited a Civil War,” Chariton tweeted on January 6, the date of the Capitol breach. However, after YouTube pulled video from...

Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday took aim at the country’s largest technology companies, which he characterized as a group of "monopoly communications platforms" based on the way they have grown to regulate public discourse. "These platforms have changed from neutral platforms that provided Americans with the freedom to speak, to enforcers of preferred narratives," DeSantis said during a press conference. "Consequently, these platforms have played an increasingly decisive role in elections and have negatively impacted Americans who dissent from orthodoxies favored by the big tech cartel." DeSantis targeted tech companies over content moderation, which he equated to political...

Liberals have realized that the massive support for Donald Trump and his views is not going away. As long as freedom of speech survives and distrust of the liberal media persists, Democrats are unable to capture control of the minds of the American people.First they wrongly impeached President Trump for a political speech, and now the Democrats are going full throttle to censor anyone who speaks out for ordinary Americans as Trump did.Newly elected Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is the latest target of this liberal censorship. Despite being sworn in less than merely a month ago, Greene is being...

"You can whiz on my leg but don't tell me it's raining"

Once upon a time, stock trading served as a way for businesses to raise capital and for traders to make investments. If companies flourished, stocks rose and investors made money; if not, stocks fell and investors lost money. This was the way the stock market was intended to function. Over time, however, more and more rules and regulations were added, each to address something that at the time was thought necessary to prevent cheating and manipulation. Just like the proverbial “Road to Hell,” Wall Street became paved with regulatory good intentions. Instead of eradicating cheating, manipulation, and fraud every new...

Flanked by legislators and Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez, Gov. Ron DeSantis declared war Tuesday on a “big tech cartel” that has played fast and loose with Florida’s “public square” for too long, and he issued a series of recommendations that seem destined for fast track legislation this year as the Transparency in Technology Act. “Today they may come after someone who looks like me. Tomorrow they may come after someone who looks like you,” DeSantis warned toward the end of long-form remarks decrying tech companies and vowing action. The Governor, addressing reporters at the State Capitol after Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting,...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held a news conference Tuesday to announce the support of legislation to protect social media users' privacy, saying "big tech has come to look more like big brother with each passing day." The governor said the legislation will seek a slew of changes that DeSantis says will protect privacy and censorship by social media platforms. He called out Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple and Amazon for being "nameless, faceless boards of censors." "Over the years, however, these platforms have changed from neutral platforms that provided Americans with the freedom to speak to enforcers of preferred narratives," DeSantis...

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently penned a column titled "A Letter to My Conservative Friends," with the subheading "Hold us accountable, but please do the same for the charlatans who deceive you, use you and cheat you." Kristof doesn't name any conservative friends, so we can't be sure he has any. It's fascinating to insist he holds the cheating, manipulative "charlatans" on the conservative side accountable; this sounds like a fine idea. But Kristof isn't writing from a position of strength. A Nexis database search reveals Kristof has never written anything critical in his two decades of columns...

Dr. Simone Gold lays out the facts on HCH, lying politicians , government officials and big tech dictators who created a pandemic for total control.

“I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives. Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have,” Bezos said. “He will be an outstanding leader, and he has my full confidence.” The announcement comes just 90 minutes before Amazon reports what is expected to be a blowout holiday quarter earning report. “As much as I still tap dance into the office, I’m excited about this transition,” Bezos said, adding that he will focus on “the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The...

This past weekend, several social media accounts started to make alarming announcements. Products they sold — some of which they had sold for months — were suddenly rated “not approved” on Instagram and Facebook, prohibiting their sale. The common denominator? No, not something political. They were all Catholic. One was an author, Carrie Gress, whose book “The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity” was removed. The book on Catholicism and culture is not new, though it was published fairly recently in 2019. According to the screenshots she shared, she was alerted that the item no longer follows the...

Over these past few weeks, Apple has experienced something it isn't used to: bad PR in the wake of essentially banning popular social media app Parler from its phones without publicly providing any truthful explanationWar is brewing in Silicon Valley. A long-simmering fight between Apple and Facebook — two of the architects of Big Tech — spilled into the avenue this past week, with commercial and legal threats hitting the pages of both tech publications and broader media.To read the Cult of Mac journalists who dominate Big Tech reporting, you’d think America had flipped the calendar back 10 years to...

CNN’s Brian Stelter said a “liar's reach” should be limited in order to combat “information pollution” on social media and competing news outlets. “How can that harm be reduced? Well, Big Tech platforms say they are removing lies about vaccines and stamping out stop the steal B.S. and QAnon cult content. Do these private companies have too much power? Many people would say sure. ... But reducing a liar’s reach is not the same as censors freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is different than freedom of reach,” Stelter said Sunday on Reliable Sources. “News consumers are both overfed and...

There’s nothing more tiresome than hackneyed references to The Matrix, except for the constant propaganda we’re hosed down with by the Establishment and its media lackeys about how everything is groovy in our totally free, free enterprise paradise of freedom and happiness and more freedom. Some of us have been woke for a while, having realized the undeniable truth that the system is rigged for the benefit of a garbage ruling class, whose sole accomplishment is to perpetuate a paradigm in which they maintain power and prestige by controlling institutions they didn’t create or build. Instead, they are cultural trust...

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on Twitter’s attack on free speech: Catholic World Report (CWR) is a respectable Catholic media outlet and a publication of Ignatius Press. On January 24, it received notice from Twitter that its account has been locked for hateful conduct. CWR appealed but lost. What was the alleged hate speech? CWR journalist Matt Hadro posted the following tweet on January 19. “Biden plans to nominate Dr. Rachel Levine, a biological man identifying as a transgender woman who has served as Pennsylvania’s health secretary since 2017, to be HHS Assistant Secretary for Health. Levine is also...

May N.Y. Businesses Fire Employees for Using Parler and Gab? Colleen Oefelein was fired by the Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency, and the incident illustrates the vagueness of New York law on this point.

Editor's note: This column was authored by Emilie Dye. Last January, you could buy a bitcoin for less than $9,000 — that's roughly the downpayment on a 2018 Ford F-150. Today, it costs around $37,000 — that's almost enough to buy the truck outright. Much of bitcoin’s recent popularity is a product of the times. In 2020, governments around the world spent tax dollars like teenagers throwing around their dads’ credit cards. It’s not surprising that many now wonder if maybe we shouldn’t trust the government to be the guardian of the money supply. Bitcoin is an entirely digital currency...

Google appeared to remove nearly 100,000 negative reviews for the Robinhood app after outraged investors bombarded the stock-trading startup with complaints. Amateur traders urged each other online to leave negative reviews for the app in the Google Play Store after Robinhood froze trading on shares of GameStop and other stocks whose prices have exploded this week. The campaign appeared to work — Robinhood’s Android app had a one-star rating based on nearly 275,000 reviews on Thursday, according to a screenshot captured by 9to5Google. But that number had fallen to just over 176,000 by midday Friday as Google apparently purged the...